Authors: Cam Rogers
“And you just pieced that all together.”
“It’s a theory.”
“And you think I didn’t notice who that message was addressed to? September?”
Beth’s heart sank.
“‘Go Team Outland’? Skinny weirdo with a—”
“With a sniper rifle, I get it.”
“You want to tell me what’s really going on here? Zed?”
“I honestly don’t know if Will’s message was meant for me, Jack. I don’t know if ‘September’ is a name I give him at some point. That’s the truth. I’m more interested in the date of that recording. You remember July 4, 2010?”
How could he forget? Sixteen years ago. Paul, Zed, himself at the Overlook. “Aberfoyle.”
“Coinkydink, you think?”
“Coincidence that you disappeared the same day the Countermeasure did?”
“Now wait a minute, that’s not—”
“It’s not what? Paul and I got woken up at four
A.M
. by three goons who then decided not to kill us because
you
called their boss. They drive us across town and you pull that magic trick on top of the Overlook. Will—who was being held at
gunpoint across town
—is suddenly released without question, and later that day his workshop is trashed. Then both you and the Countermeasure disappear on the same day. But hey, now you’re back. And you work for Monarch.”
Beth chewed her lip. “That does look bad doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, Zed, it looks pretty fuckin’ bad.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“If you work for the other side then I can’t stop you doing whatever you’re going to do next. All I can do is ask you not to do it.”
“I’ve always been on your side, even when I left.”
He didn’t want his emotions to dictate what he said next, so he looked at the machine.
“Here’s what I know,” he said, trying to sound confident. “A machine can only take me back as far as the moment of its activation. This machine was activated long before Monarch’s. If it can get me back to just before Monarch’s university machine was activated, then I can find Will. I can save him and he can help us fix this.” Complex arguments weren’t his strength, but he did his best. “Wait, hear me out: just because right now says I didn’t go back and save Will doesn’t mean I can’t make a present in which I did.
Proving
that I can or can’t change the past is impossible, right? Because whatever the
present
is it’s connected to a past built on a causality that has denied all attempts at changing it. That doesn’t mean creating one of those alternates is impossible. It just means
proving
that it’s possible is impossible. Right? All I can do is try and see what happens.”
Nick piped up from the back of the room: “What?”
“You really are Will’s brother,” she said. “I had a few conversations like that, back in the day. Maybe that’s why I like you so much.”
Jack shrugged. “So maybe stick around this time.”
“Maybe I will.”
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 3:43
P
.
M
. Outside Riverport Swimming Hall. Five hours and thirty-seven minutes later.
Beth snapped off a piece of grass, adjusted her sunglasses. Amber light bounced intensely off the water. “They say the river’s coming back to life these days, since the docks shut down.” Beneath the bridge, on the other side of the broad support across from the swimming hall, reeds poked out of an artificial peninsula of accumulated trash. The ducks didn’t seem to mind.
Jack’s eyes were on the one building that dominated Riverport’s new skyline: Monarch Tower. “The news is saying the gala’s tonight, and it’s going to be huge. Their CEO is launching a whole range of promise-the-world bullshit.” The building was an asymmetrical black obelisk fifty floors high. The Monarch logo—a fragmented, geometric butterfly—glowed incarnadine against that surface of glossy black glass.
“We call it Mordor,” Beth said.
“‘We’?”
“Not everyone in that building is a reptile, Jack. Monarch does well because it delivers on most of its promises. Look around. Remember what Riverport was like when you left? It was devolving into
this.
” She jerked a thumb toward the discarded neighborhood around them. “Massachusetts flyover country. Not even a second-rate cousin to Worcester. Six years later and look at it: dog walkers and artisanal coffee and people who couldn’t afford a trailer are now bitching about their McMansion not having a Ping-Pong table.”
“I’m going to use that machine, Beth. I have to.”
“I know.”
“I could go back early enough to stop Paul going through, y’know. Stop him turning into whatever he is now.”
“You can try, you’re right about that.”
“You’re not going to stop me?”
“I don’t need to, Jack.”
“You’re very relaxed about this.”
“Want to see a trick?”
“Sure.”
Beth reached into her pocket, pulled out two sets of soft foam earplugs. Handed one to Jack and put hers in. Jack did the same, skeptically. Then Beth pulled out a revolver.
“Uh, you got that where?”
“Nick’s glove compartment.” She snapped the cylinder open, popped out all six shells, put one back in. The barrel chittered when she spun it, then she snapped it shut.
“I’ve seen this movie. Knock it off.”
Beth pressed the barrel to her head—
“No!”
—and fired.
Click
.
Jack made a grab; she sidestepped.
Click
.
He grabbed again. She deflected.
“Stop it!”
Click.
“Zed!”
The gun was still to her head. “If I stop, you won’t get it.”
Click.
Jack punched her in the face. Her head jerked back. The gun discharged, the bullet flying at a forty-five-degree angle past her head. It ate a piece of brickwork with a short, sharp shriek.
“
Knock it off!
” he yelled, uselessly, having gone sheet white. “Fuck. I’m sorry. Fuck. Are you … you were…”
She looked him in the eye, pissed off, jammed the barrel to her temple, and pulled.
Click.
When she took it away there was a circular brand where the muzzle had kissed her. Then she threw it away. “I can’t die,” she said, yanking the plugs out of her ears. “I can’t die because when I was eight years old I met my older self. I can’t die because I haven’t done that yet, I haven’t gone back and met my younger self, you understand? I’ve always done whatever I’ve wanted, knowing that at worst I’m looking at a hospital stay. Parkour, martial arts, hang gliding, skydiving, bungee jumping, hitchhiking, roof surfing, hanging out with pirates and reprobates, staying up too late, not looking before I cross the street, everything that just went down at your old house … free pass. Makes me a very, very good operative. Nobody gets to kill me, nobody gets to take me down. The laws of causality won’t permit it.” She pointed back toward the swimming hall. “I go through that machine? Meet myself? I’m done. All bets are off. After that I could develop an allergy to fabric softener and drop dead. Choke on a fucking kiwi.” The adrenaline was washing out of her, bumming her out. She leaned heavily against the brickwork. “You wanted to know how I pulled off that magic trick on Bannerman’s Overlook? It has something to do with that. Same reason I’m not dead on the ground right now with Nick’s gun in my hand.” She stared at the reeds, tossed the plugs into them along with all the other trash.
Jack had taken his out, was staring at her. “You could have just
fucking said so
.”
“It wouldn’t have sunk in. You’ll come to rely on me being capable, but what if I go through that machine, meet myself, and from then on I’m second-guessing every move I make? You need to step up. No matter what it costs. If we fail, everything dies.”
“And not meeting your younger self isn’t an option. Right.”
“Right. If I don’t then I’m not here, we’re not talking, and nobody is trying to stop Monarch. If my older self doesn’t spirit my younger self away to a string of West Coast and South American training camps I don’t become me and there’s nobody here to save the day. But it’s not just me. You need to do the right thing, even if that means abandoning your brother, killing your friend, anything at all that means we succeed. Be prepared to do things you never thought you’d have to, because the alternative is so much worse.”
“Paul said something similar.”
“We’re both right, but he’s going about it the wrong way. That’s all I know.” She’d said her piece. Done. “So the mission is this: we go back, we find the Countermeasure, find out what it does, and then—most likely—we get it back here. That done, we fix the Fracture and save the world.”
“Beth.”
“Yes, Jack.”
“We don’t know what the Countermeasure is, or even what it looks like.”
“No. But we know who had it last, and where. The rest we improvise.”
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 4:37
P
.
M
. Riverport Swimming Hall.
Nick patched up the coffee maker, found a few plastic cups in the cafe overlooking the pool, and made a passable espresso with what was left of his pods. The three of them sat on camp chairs in the pool, next to Will’s workstations. The sunlight through the filthy vertical skylights was blazing amber as it approached sunset.
“What do you remember about 2010?” Beth asked.
Nick shrugged. “Best of times, worst of times. Played center position on the ice and everyone knew my name. My face was on coffee mugs. I had my college ride, and then I blew it. You?”
Jack shrugged, sipped his coffee. “Spent the first six months getting sick of my brother, the last six months looking for her.” He jerked a thumb at Beth.
“What about you, Beth?”
“First six months hanging out with this guy, last six months in a compound in Arizona. Ran a lot.”
“What kind of compound? Like—”
“Just a bunch of guys waiting for the end of the world. Ex-special forces. Thought they’d seen the writing on the wall and made a few decisions. I was just there to learn.”
“Guns and stuff?”
“Mainly cognitive, mental, and physical. Resolve. Teamwork. Judgment and adaptability. Discipline. Stress control. Multitasking.” She finished her coffee, surveyed Will’s battered old machine.
“So you’re really doing this,” Nick said.
Beth stood. Jack took her by the arm. “If we do this we’re only going back six years. That’s more than fifteen years
after
you met yourself. You don’t need to come along. Stay here. If I don’t come back—”
“I’ve made my peace. Don’t psych me out now, Jack, okay? Let’s do this.”
Her eyes were sharp and her voice certain. Jack let it go, but he didn’t like it.
Jack went to refamiliarize himself with the instrumentation—Will’s device being far more primitive than Monarch’s. Beth didn’t follow. She walked up the ramp.
“Paul said something similar.”
That’s what Jack had said to Beth earlier. She stood at the machine’s airlock, palm against the hand-riveted metal frame. Paul had entered Monarch’s machine and been reborn as something altogether different. Beth was on the same path. Both of them were attempting to save the world, in their own way; both of them thought they were right; both of them knew the past couldn’t be changed, were dedicated to their cause and, she knew, both of them would be reshaped by traveling through these machines.
The machine shouldn’t have smelled like anything more than age and industrial grease, but not so. It had a scent of its own, the lingering, meaty heaviness of …
“Death.”
She stepped inside the airlock, a heavy, ten-foot square iron chamber reminiscent of something submersible. It was clear just how heavily Monarch had based their design on Will’s work—it was functionally identical: clockwise for future travel, counter-clockwise for past. Unlike the Monarch machine, this corridor was rigid, not self-assembling, and midnight dark in both directions. The stink grew more intense as she stood in the chamber.
She exited.
“I think something might have died in there,” she called out, hoping for an obvious answer.
Jack was moving from console to console. “Will wasted a lot of money on that security system if a raccoon can get in here. It’s just old. All right Nick, can you get us some juice?”
Jack’s reasoning didn’t make her feel any better. She glanced back into that darkened airlock, interior details half-formed in the shadows. Beth suppressed a chill.
Nick redirected power from the gennie. There was a deep
thunk
and the airlock interior illuminated under the power of an old-school filament bulb, which promptly popped. The corridor trembled as behind the scenes the contraption’s innards shifted and the core came online. Beth took a few careful steps backward down the ramp.
The vibration joined forces with a secondary instability, their crashing and separating rhythms beginning to shake components loose from the Promenade. A distortion wave struggled into existence around the corridor-ring but was failing to become substantial.
The shaking and thrashing built in strength as systems beneath the machine began to emit desperate, high-pitched alarms. This wasn’t working.
“Goddamn it, no. Nick! Reset the power!” Wheeling away from the destination console, Jack moved to reboot the core when Beth got in his way.
“No.”
“What do you mean ‘no’? I’m trying again.”
“The hell you are. Clearly something is wrong with this thing, and none of us have any idea what it is. If you damage it, we’re boned.”
“We can’t stop trying. Will’s notes are all over this place. Maybe we can—”
“We’d have as much luck trying to repair the Large Hadron Collider.” She sighed. “And I’ve seen your brother’s handwriting. We need an expert. Fortunately, I know where to get one. Dr. Sofia Amaral. Head of Monarch’s Chronon Research Division and one of the handful of authorities on your brother’s research worldwide. One of the few who risked their careers to give Will any credibility at all. She’s a believer, and she built the Monarch machine. Well, she and Dr. Kim.”